The Widow Nash: A Novel

by Jamie Harrison

  She kicked Carrie’s ankle, and the Harper ’s slid from her lap to the floor, but she didn’t wake. Dulcy scooped it up and found bilge:

  Ah, that foolish dream of mine had proven true: I knew her, I knew her, unmistaking, without doubt or hesitancy—and in the dark! How should I know at the mere sound of her voice? I think I knew before she spoke!

  Carrie had changed dresses, but she was still aromatic and stained, her pale blond hair flat on her head. She looked like a pretty strand of kelp with a doll’s porcelain face. Their better clothes were buried in the luggage car with Walton’s coffin.

  It didn’t do, thinking of the lost world, and so Dulcy left it again. The pale young man, who had chosen a seat across from a stocky man who talked loudly about the insurance business, was big-boned, with a good wool coat, an expensive hat he now placed on the seat next to him, and thick, well-cut hair. He didn’t seem quivery, or agitated, or prone to exclamation points, but he was thin, with a kind of diminished look that might have come from illness, or alcohol, or shot nerves. Dulcy couldn’t tell if he was twenty-five or thirty-five, but she liked his face, and she could tell he deeply regretted his choice of seatmate: the insurance man hadn’t stopped talking.

  Run now, or regret, she thought. But the young man raised a finger for the porter, and his pragmatism pulled her back to the newly imagined husband, her necessary creation. Dented, she thought, but not weak. Sick was not weak, until the heartbreaking end of things; she’d be good at these details. This husband had died young, not more than thirty. Perhaps a tropical illness—not a sexual one—with consumption as a nail in the coffin. They had traveled widely, spending their time alone together in anonymous places, and he’d left behind little sign of his existence.

  The cardplayers were insulting each other, dropping cards in mock disgust and giggling, wheezy and raucous. They were wearing black, too: the world was made of mourning women. Someone was always dying, and someone was always dusting off black silk. The thick insurance man must have liked this notion: “They might not all be dark complexioned, but they think that way. Warm climates, you know. I’m of the hope that the Irish will simply kill them off.”

  The younger man tapped the pages of his open book—shield of the traveler—and beamed up at the very, very dark porter, who’d arrived to save the day. When he left, his companion started in again, but in a strained whisper; here was a man who didn’t want the staff to add anything extra to a meal. “They’re trying to join all the orders.”

  “Dark people?” asked the young man.

  “Slavs, Italians, Spaniards. Not to mention the truly dark ones.”

  “And who are your people?” asked the young man. The question sounded polite; it might not have been. His eyes drooped, and he curled his lip well; in that sense he might have fit into Carrie’s short story. He could be a Pinkerton; Victor couldn’t resort to Henning’s brothers again, but he might have hired a detective—would a Pinkerton have a sense of humor? And what did it matter, anyway, if someone was following them?

  Dulcy moved in her seat, and felt her damage, and wondered why her brain felt so strange and shuttered and peaceful. The window gave her a thousand more spruce trees, a million more snowflakes: she felt like she was watching her mind dissolve. Someone had opened a pane, and flakes touched her face and pushed the stink of cigars to the back of the car.

  “Scotch and German,” said the insurance man, oblivious.

  Her sharper Remfrey brain, the one she would never shed, thought xenophobic prick , and she floated away again to her promising, very dead husband. Tubercular or feverish, possibly wounded: an American back from the Philippines, an Englishman who’d served in Africa? She wouldn’t know enough to be believable; Walton had been a flawed parent but adept at steering his daughters away from soldiers. She circled the idea of a mountaineer, but she’d seen so many crushed and splintered animals and vegetables and minerals that self-inflicted injuries—injuries of amusement—lacked nobility. Though how was climbing any riskier than sleeping with everyone who volunteered?

  The porter reappeared with large brown drinks, and the young man put his book down and used the same hand to take tip money from his pocket. The big talker seized an opening. “In any event, we’re flooded with thieves. All of them highly sexed.”

  “Oh God,” said Carrie, eyes still shut. “Get me some water. Who is the person who drones?”

  “You’ll see him soon enough,” said Dulcy. She was fascinated by the young man’s expression as the insurance man blathered on, a look that was both tight and wild-eyed. He was cornered, and he looked it. Maybe he’d drink too much. Maybe he’d scream, or have a fit.

  “Of course, real tradesmen are another question,” said the big man. “These people are good with stone. A man of ability will always be recommended and make his way, don’t you think?”

  “No,” said the young man, though he smiled enthusiastically and reached for the glass, again using his right arm. Dulcy was sure now that something was wrong with the left. “I don’t think that, at all. I think for some reason you would rather have bad work from a Scottish mason than brilliant stuff from a Sicilian or Romanian.”

  A normal flush started on the neck; the insurance man’s nose turned the color of a raspberry. He looked around for an escape, but there were no empty seats. “It’s only a guess,” said the young man. “I’m happy to admit I’m often wrong. Stay and argue with me.”

  Dulcy smiled as she turned to the window, temporarily in love with the world again.

  •••

  In the dining car, Dulcy gave Carrie one of Walton’s pink stomach pills. They watched passengers and made guesses out of boredom, mostly unkind: the bearded men in the back sat too close to each other; a little man who stared at the ceiling like it was God must be a dipso. Carrie thought the blowhard college boys in one corner were charming—fictional heroes should be morose, but real men had to be sunny. Alfred honked like a goose—a wealthy, intelligent goose—and had a scrubbed, optimistic face.

  Dulcy guessed the college boys were spoiled weasels, but at least they didn’t look like they were related to Henning. A handsome blond man was unreadable: he had classic features, but the set of his face never really changed, which could be indicative of deep thought or none at all. A woman with gray hair and a gray blouse—she looked as if she were in the process of becoming a ghost—cut up meat for an ancient man whose bright eyes scanned the people on the train. Dulcy didn’t think he could talk, but he’d studied the menu the way she did: earnestly. “Are they married?” she asked Carrie.

  “Of course not, nor biblical. Impossible. She’s his nurse, or his niece or daughter. She avoids even thinking of birds and bees.”

  Unlike those well-raised Remfrey girls. Dulcy ordered oysters, a salad of beets and apples, salmon with Chablis sauce. Carrie had vol-au-vent à la Toulouse and saddle of lamb, with asparagus and hollandaise on the side. Dulcy hoped the pill kept working, so that neither of them had to see any of these dishes twice. They had glasses of Heidsieck and slices of citron cake with boozy berries and thick cream. The mood improved. Dulcy shut out the things that had ended, the things she couldn’t change and that Carrie didn’t understand. Neither of them brought up Walton in the luggage car, and neither felt self-conscious about this. Dulcy emptied Carrie’s champagne flute; Carrie finished the cake crumbs on Dulcy’s plate and nattered about finding a wedding gown with a forgiving waist.

  “After I find a forgiving funeral dress,” she added. “Do you supposed Victor will actually get on a train?”

  Dulcy watched one of the college men snap the other with a Princeton scarf, a Victor flag.

  “I imagine he’ll become calmer once he makes the money back,” said Carrie. “What did his letter say? That he loves you again?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Dulcy.

  “Of course it does,” said Carrie, but now she wa
s watching the attentive ginger-bearded men incline toward each other, ever so slightly. “And how odd are they?” she asked.

  “As odd as they’d like to be,” said Dulcy.

  “What do they do, when they’re alone with each other?”

  “You’d like me to guess about this out loud?”

  “I would,” said Carrie, leaning forward. Her cheeks were pink again, and her wide blue eyes wanted fun, or a fight. But Dulcy was watching the porter hand a fresh whiskey to the thin man, who surrendered his book to take it. All was revealed: the third and fourth fingers of his left hand were missing, and the back of the hand was scarred.

  “Do you think it was an explosion?” asked Carrie, miner’s daughter. “A captain? He’s awfully well-dressed, but he’s young enough to have gone to one of the technical colleges.”

  The train lurched, and the insurance man turned to reassure the unworried cardplayers. The young man downed half his drink and reclaimed his book: Nostromo. He looked hunted, as well he should. “No,” Dulcy said. “He’s a veteran.” She slid back into her story: my husband was a soldier. She’d have to read up. You needed a man to really disappear.

  •••

  Sometimes, while they traveled, Walton had talked about the West as a dreamscape, a place like the steppes or the outback, and he would describe how sun-blasted and moon-blasted and immense it had seemed at first. The landscape made him think of Spain, and it made him feel a little like Don Quixote. And so Dulcinea: this was meant to be her landscape.

  She thought about this when she woke up to a jolt of worry about whether the door was locked, confusion at the way her neck and ribs hurt, before she understood the train sounds and heard Carrie’s breathing in the lower bunk. They were passing through another bleak town, wood buildings so fresh people could probably watch them warp, on their way up to a plateau with long slow humps of winter wheat. The snow was a goose-down blanket over an infinity, a death march, of dirty gold grass.

  Dulcy’s new landscape: not New York, not Seattle, no place Victor knew or could possibly understand. She lurched into her clothes and made her way back to the dining car. Onward Christian soldiers: the breakfast menu didn’t offer much of a virtuous middle ground between health and excess. She considered oatmeal and fresh fruit before asking for coffee with cream, sausages with fried apples, hashed potatoes, a poached egg. She watched the rest of the diners, but in this harsh light, a day later, no one seemed Victor-sent. The beards were too interested in each other, the talky insurance agent was far too self-involved, and the man with the wounded hand so lacked interest in anyone that he hadn’t come to breakfast. The volume in the car went up as the card-playing ladies in black entered, laughing again. Mourning—who was to judge? Maybe there’d been no love at all, only duty. They drank cider with their hash and rolled their eyes at the landscape. The handsome blond ate a whole egg with each bite, and while his elegant jaw moved like a stamping press, it occurred to her that he hadn’t read a word since he’d boarded. She thought of the way that Victor ate—his eggs would have been hard-cooked, sliced into a half-dozen bites—and suddenly wanted to be sick, wanted to be off the train, wanted to be hidden and still and anonymous, vanished, a blank. She lost all doubt.

  She was seated near the galley, where the black porter was talking about what he planned to do on his break in Spokane—see his mother, drink whiskey, watch a play. Dulcy pulled paper and a pen from her bag and finally replied to Victor’s letter. She waved to the porter and gave him twenty dollars for a few favors: he would mail Victor’s letter, redirect Walton’s trunk, and forget he’d done either of these things.

  •••

  In the cabin, Carrie was still folded like a handkerchief in the bottom bunk. The train was ripping around curves like a bobsled, catching up with itself, as Dulcy climbed into the upper bunk, smoothed her map, and confirmed that due to the snow they’d be at least twelve hours late on the seventeen-hundred-mile trip to St. Paul. The Boys would cool their heels at a good hotel, relieved to have the reunion postponed. Spokane had become a daytime stop, and the mountain towns of northern Montana had no outlet beyond this east – west route. Too early, too late. If she had anything in mind, anything at all, it wasn’t a mountain pass or a prairie.

  The train inched into another narrow-canyoned lumber town, and passengers picked their way across frozen mud toward ugly taverns. It was the kind of place a low winter sun never reached. In a few days, Victor would pass this with his eyes squinched, not understanding the size of the landscape, the way anyone could disappear. Still, people got off at all these stops, mostly from the tourist cars. Which was a bit of a joke—surely she was the tourist, and these battered people were on their way to another war.

  “What hole are we in now?” asked Carrie. “And would you stop rattling that paper? What are you looking at?”

  “Nothing worth talking about,” said Dulcy. She climbed down. They watched a young woman slide on the boards along the track, nearly dropping a baby and a corduroy valise.

  Carrie looked away. “You’d tell Martha. I would very much like to talk to her now,” she said. “I miss her so much, and I feel worse for not missing Dad a bit.”

  Dulcy curled around her, and for a while they were quiet. Dulcy reached for the novel Carrie had been reading, wedged between the train wall and the bunk. She flipped pages: portents, seductions, revelations. It was about a Boston girl who boarded a ship for France after being seduced, ravished . Her rapist had a dream of guilt and pursued, but learned on the docks of Marseille that she’d jumped overboard; he vowed to be a better man.

  Ravished . Did ravishers exist, in a pleasant way? Dulcy didn’t think so; she made herself remember what it had felt like, Victor holding her down, ripping at her, and any last bit of blur disappeared. “Do you think you’ll ever get your mind back?” she asked, climbing off the bunk.

  “I don’t understand anything you say,” said Carrie from under the blankets. Even her voice sounded green.

  Dulcy tugged at the window and hurled the book against a wall of pines. It started a small landslide of scree. “I might have read that one,” said Carrie, one eye open. “What happened to your lip?”

  The evidence of Victor’s very deep, truly profound emotions had ripened overnight, so that Dulcy’s lip no longer looked pleasantly bee-stung. Her mind was doing the same thing, losing its facade, letting its bruising up to the surface. “I dropped my book while I was reading.”

  “There’s my point,” said Carrie. She smiled. “We should both read lighter books for a bit.”

  •••

  That afternoon, the young man with the missing fingers, having hidden successfully all morning, was pinned down again as the insurance man launched into the Russian-Japanese conflict, the unrest in Moscow, and the wayward nature of automobiles, a boon to his business. For once he was timely: as the train slowed at the outskirts of Missoula, they passed a crushed green Rambler, and the conductor explained that a driver had misunderstood a train the week before. This same train.

  Misunderstood. They mulled it over while they waited for a freight to go by. The bright green curl of metal looked like a giant had stomped on it, then gnawed it in half; it couldn’t have looked worse after an earthquake. “Is he dead?” asked one of the card-playing ladies. She had loose pale eyes and a thin red mouth, but she wasn’t as grim as her features, and she smiled often.

  “Oh, they all are,” said the conductor. “Before the snow, you could still see blood.”

  Heads swiveled. Dulcy knew the passengers wanted to rush to that side, and she wondered if trains could tip over, like ferries. They might have tried it, but the conductor interrupted the moment and announced a reroute through Butte, rather than Helena, because of more snow slides.

  Dulcy stood as the train slowed—she had to get out, at least walk on the platform, but the old man and his gray companion blocked the aisl
e, and she waited just behind the young man with the missing fingers while the couple wrestled with a dropped cane. He was studying the crooked wall of a firetrap theater, where a recruiting poster for the war in the Philippines was half covered by the generous shape of the actress Anna Held, a cloud of a woman who did whatever she wanted to do when she wasn’t attached to a building. He held a notebook instead of a novel, and his script was tight and even. She read a line marooned in the center of the page, above and below dense paragraphs:

  I’d do better with someone else’s plot.

  She studied the clockwise whorl in his chocolaty hair. He smelled nice, at least for someone who’d spent two days on a train. She wondered what he really thought, and if she’d like it, before the old man moved and she hurried down the aisle.

  Dulcy wandered down the platform, thinking past the reroute and one more ruined plan. She sucked in new air, the smell of dirt and different trees. It was almost fifty degrees; she heard a splashing sound by the baggage cars, ice beginning to melt under Minnesotabound shellfish. Walton would be warming up, too.

  Back inside, the passengers dozed. Carrie had been stung enough by Dulcy’s criticism to plow through The Soft Side, and Dulcy returned to her quest for a husband with a military history in Victor’s last issue of the Atlantic . William James against the Rough Riders’ world:

  The plain truth is that people want war. They want it anyhow; for itself; and apart from each and every possible consequence. It is the final bouquet of life’s fireworks. The born soldiers want it hot and actual. The non-combatants want it in the background, and always as an open possibility... What moves them is not the blessings it has won for us, but a vague religious exaltation. War, they feel, is human nature at its uttermost. We are here to do our uttermost. It is a sacrament. Society would rot, they think, without the mystical bloodpayment.